Sanchez’s TV roadshow and the Spanish Strawberry Boycott- Spanish 2023 election

This election resembles much more of a prelude to tragedy, rather than a confrontation of the reckoning Spain has to make with itself.

Sanchez’s TV roadshow

PSOE leader Pedro Sanchez challenged PP Leader Feijóo this week to six, yes six, head to head debates across television. The reason ostensibly is that the PSOE leader wants to go head to head with Feijóo which, due to Feijóo being based in the Senate and not the Congress of Deputies, means the two men who seek to govern Spain have not interacted. The real reason of course is that Sanchez is desperate to exclude Yolanda Diaz’s Sumar and any other party from the debates to turn the race, in the eyes of the public, into just PSOE vs PP, and so hopefully hoover back some votes for himself.

The perfect scenario for Pedro Sanchez would be that Vox are entitled to take part in debates due to their parliamentary size and Sumar (who are an amalgamation but not yet with their own members in the congress) could not. Then Sanchez would have for himself PP and Vox on the other side and he wouldn’t have to open his mouth, the picture would do it all for him.

Of course, other parties have predictably attacked this stich up and Feijóo has obviously declined. There is clearly no benefit to the front runner in PP of turning the electoral campaign into a TV circus and basically forcing him to spend all his time preparing for TV debates and not actually campaigning. It all feels very John Major demanding a TV debate with Tony Blair when he was going to get crushed. The TV companies would love it of course for the ratings but the reality is that when parties and candidates can skip the middle man of the TV and go straight to the source on social media, the need for any leader or party to bend the knee to TV companies is rapidly diminishing. The age of the tedious American import of the ‘gladitorial’ TV debate, which makes the campaign about pundits and soundbites, is coming to an end, which is no bad thing at all (unless you are Pedro Sanchez).

Pablo Iglesias: the man who won’t shut up

The former leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, has been accused of lying. Nothing new there of course but this time it was from the leader of the Left wing party in Madrid that supplanted Podemos, Mas Madrid’s leader Monica Garcia.

The drama was over Iglesias saying Monica Garcia has blocked Podemos members from being part of the joint Sumar list. The Left can ill afford these petty divisions with the election just weeks away but the main point here is about Iglesias. He went into Government with PSOE much diminished in November 2019 before quitting to run Podemos’ Madrid Regional Election campaign in 2021. At the time it felt like he was looking for a way out of politics or from having to govern and so it proved, with him quitting after that election. Did he respectfully exit the stage and move on to allow others to emerge? Of course not.

No, he immediately got rid of his stupid ponytail and was everywhere, constantly on TV programs and radio shows and podcasts. Like many, he preferred the cushier role of critic to the boring work of government, but it would be better for all concerned if, just for a few weeks, he could keep his mouth firmly shut.

Spain’s agricultural conflict

Away from the campaign trail, pretty shocking scenes emerged from Salamanca with farmers physically attacking state buildings and police officers over regulations on bovine tuberculosis. PP and Vox had promised in campaigns to ease these restrictions (probably knowing a court would strike them down, engaging in the luxury of permanent opposition), but the Court of Justice of Castilla y León accepted the request of the Minister of Agriculture to tighten the restrictions again, going against the PP-Vox led regional government.

You could see this as a legalese attack on democratic decisions but to see the consequences of where this kind of liberalisation goes, one only needs to look at Doñana National Park in the also PP-Vox controlled Andalucia . The nature reserve, after the loosening of regulations and illegal water leeching from the park by farmers that had not been punished, is becoming a barren desert and an environmental catastrophe. Germany, where 30% of the strawberries from this region are sold, are now engaged in a move to boycott all Spanish strawberries from this region.

Much like the issue of a Spanish generation trapped in their parent’s houses or the rising nationalism of a younger generation in the Basque Country and Catalonia, who have zero incentive to support the status quo, Spain’s increasing desertification of its territory and the conflict this has with one of its few viable exports (agricultural goods) is not something that is going to be solved or probably even remarked on in the national campaign. This election resembles much more a prelude to tragedy, rather than a confrontation of the reckoning Spain has to make with itself.